Assembly Line

We give you a product design from our R&D department. You design and build a factory to make it as efficiently and profitably as possible, using the latest in industrial robotics and other automated machinery. Do it well and we might not fire you!

Diary Entries

Assembly Line 0.5 - Post-Comp Pre-Pyggy Release

I have uploaded a new version of Assembly Line. As a potential Pyggy entry, I'm keen to get some testing and feedback on it.

This version is greatly expanded. Some of the new features include:

More machine types and enhanced machine functionality

Simulation of a market that's buying your products

Multiple factories

Extensive reports showing what's going on with sales and finances

Sales and profit targets to aim for, and salary raises to seek after

Note that not all the products and machines are available at once now. The new machines will become available as the game progresses (about one every two months of game time) and you need to spend money to research new products.

I still haven't done much playtesting or balancing -- I've verified that the Phunky Phrisbee, Mojo Mallet and Supa Slice can be manufactured and sold at a profit, but I don't know about the others yet.

Another web site comment

When you follow a link to a diary entry from the main page, it's not clear which team/game the diary entry relates to. You can find out by following the author link of the first comment, but it would be better to have the team and game name displayed prominently at the top somewhere.

More generally, everywhere a team or team member is mentioned, it would be useful to have the game name displayed beside it as well. It can be hard to remember which people and teams go with which games.

Also, I have a general feeling that the whole site layout is somewhat confusing and hard to find one's way around, although I'm not sure exactly what needs to be done about it.

I'm thinking the diary entries list is the wrong thing to have for the main page. The main page should have a definite look of "main-ness" about it, with large prominent links to all the other areas and a small amount of descriptive text letting you know about each one.

As it is, the site doesn't really seem to have a "main" page at all, which makes me feel a bit lost and wondering whether there are parts of the site that exist but I haven't stumbled upon yet.

Another thing that would be useful is a page that lists all the entries for a particular challenge, but without the full size screen shots, just small thumbnails of them. This would be faster to load and make it much easier to browse through the whole list.

Assembly Line - Response to Feedback

First of all, thanks to everyone who gave this game a good rating. Considering it was less than half finished, I was fully prepared for it not to attract much interest. Getting 4s and 5s was an unexpected bonus!

I'd like everyone to know that I'mn still working on it, and there will be a much improved and more complete version available to try out soon. And if the Pyggy Awards get off the ground, it'll definitely be making an appearance there!

Instructions Several people seem to have missed the fact that there was a tutorial, despite it being mentioned in the readme file under "Running the Game". Perhaps I didn't mention it prominently enough... I guess it could be easily missed in the heat of judging.

Interface
I know there are several things about the interface that need to be improved, and they will be.

Making the rest of the products Most of the products were dreamed up in about an hour on Sunday morning, and I didn't get time to even try manufacturing them. With the limited machine types available, some of them may well be impossible to make. There are several more machines I intend to add, which should help with that -- although I don't want to make things too easy!

Sound I know. I know. One of the many things that I ran out of time for.

Vertical Conveyors There is actually a way of rotating some types machine, but it's totally non-obvious and I didn't get around to documenting it: you press the R key while in the midst of positioning or dragging a machine. It should be possible to build vertical conveyors that way, although I haven't tested it much.

Bigger Factory I'm thinking about whether to allow the factory to be bigger than the screen and scrolling around in it. However, one of the ideas I have is to let you build multiple factories, and allow parts produced in one factory to be used as input to another. That would give you a way of effectively building a larger factory without the need for scrolling.

No Numeric for 2.5 Sorry about that -- I've been doing development with Python 2.3, and I hadn't realised that there were no Numeric builds readily available for 2.5. I'll see what can be done about making it work with numpy as well/instead.

At last, a release!

Finally got something that might be approaching playability. At least it demonstrates the concept. And sometimes doesn't crash.

AFQ (Anticipated Frequent Questions):

Q: Where are the robots?

A: The idea is for some of the machines in the factory to be industrial robots, but there isn't anything quite that sophisticated in there yet. If nothing else, maybe I'll put in a sweeping robot to clean the floor.